The patient critical care environment in hospitals is becoming increasingly crowded due to the number of pieces of medical equipment associated with critical care. Specifically, within the critical care environment, there is generally located a critical care bed, around which are positioned a ventilator, various monitors, one or more computer terminals for entering patient care data and an IV stand which supports one or more bags of IV solution and one or more infusion pumps. The sheer numbers of pieces of equipment spaced about a critical care hospital room and around the patient bed may result in patient care inefficiency, as a care provider must continually monitor and operate all of the pieces of equipment, which pieces of equipment may not be advantageously ergonomically arranged.
In addition to the critical care environment being crowded and somewhat cumbersome around which to work, the transfer of the various pieces of equipment along with the patient on the critical care bed from one room to another within the hospital can be tedious, time consuming and difficult to manage. One reason is that the critical care bed and the various pieces of medical equipment associated with the critical care environment are generally each individually supported on wheeled support structures. Therefore, when transferring the patient from one room to another, several pieces of wheeled equipment typically must simultaneously be rolled to the new location.
One specific piece of equipment which typically must be simultaneously transferred with the critical care bed is a wheeled IV stand, which normally supports a number of bags of IV solution as well as a number of infusion pumps It will be appreciated that simultaneous transfer of the IV stand along with the bed typically is cumbersome and time consuming due to the height of the IV stand, its location of center of gravity, etc.
It has therefore been an objective of the present invention to facilitate the transfer of IV equipment with a hospital bed when transferring the bed from one location to another.
It has been another objective of the present invention to provide for consolidating IV equipment with a hospital bed in order to "clean up" the critical care environment.